It's Time To Make Anti-Vaxxers Pay for Crashing Our Health Services
It's Time To Make Anti-Vaxxers Pay for Crashing Our Health Services
Selfishness requires proportionate responsibility
Up to 90% of Covid hospitalizations and deaths are people who still aren’t fully vaccinated.
This is crazy.
We’ve had vaccines for 250 years. We know they work.
We’ve had this vaccine for nearly a year now. And we know this vaccine works at preventing death. More than four billion people have received their first shot. After nearly 10 billion administered doses, it still hasn’t given kids autism, implanted Bill Gates surveillance chips in us, turned us into magnets, or transformed us into fabulous gay lizard alien space Jews.
This vaccine has simply prevented millions of people from dying in excruciating pain, gasping for air, lungs on fire, and feeling full of bees and boiling mud.
Yet tens of millions of Brits, Canadians, Kiwis, and Aussies refuse to take the vaccine and are destroying their national health services in the process.
The Canadian healthcare system is on the verge of collapse. In Britain, tens of thousands of nurses have quit due to burnout, chronic fatigue, and PTSD. Worse still, more than half are thinking of quitting.
Remember: Unlike the soft, spoiled, sociopathic politicians who refuse to give medics meaningful support, nurses are the toughest people on the planet, having endured nearly two straight years of body-punishing sickness, wildly unnecessary death, and untold emotional trauma amidst round-the-clock full-tilt ER pandemonium.
Today, up to 90% of Covid-related hospital “emergencies” are just people who refuse to practice basic Covid prevention — your chances of death from Covid are 32 times greater if you’re unvaccinated.
In other words, this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
The lives of hundreds of thousands of people who need cancer treatments, health checkups, operations, and other preventative procedures are at risk because of misinformation and human selfishness. And as medics leave the health service, the long-term effect will be even worse.
Why should the commons pay for people’s anti-commons decisions?
So should we force people to get vaccinated?
No, no, no, no, no.
Or rather… not in this case.
Covid is lethal, but not that lethal.
No one should be forced to get the Covid-19 vaccine.
(Wait for it…)
But we should never rule out the possibility of vaccine mandates. Different people and different nations have different risk tolerances, but if Covid-2X had a 90% transmission rate and a 90% kill rate, any reasonable democracy would be well within its mandate to require all citizens to be vaccinated.
And thanks to the UNHCR, all anti-vaxxers under a 90% kill-rate-scenario who still refused to comply would be welcomed to flee their homeland and become refugees in Brazil and America — likely the only two nations foolish enough to not mandate vaccines even in a hyper-lethal context.
But vaccine mandates are a conversation for a future and far more dangerous pandemic.
For Covid-19, we simply need to make anti-vaxxers pay for the economic burden they’re placing on the health service.
Privilege and responsibility
When I was about twelve or thirteen, my dad took me to Burger King.
“Son, by the time you’re eighteen, I want you to have no rules.”
I liked the sound of that!
He pulled out a pen and paper and drew two side-by-side boxes on sliding scales. He labeled one box Privilege and the other Responsibility.
“The more responsibility you take on, the more privileges you’ll get.”
He told me that, starting today, I no longer had a bedtime.*
*So long as I did my homework without him asking, and got enough sleep that I wouldn’t treat my siblings poorly. Fair enough.
He told me I no longer had a curfew.*
*So long as I also told my parents where I was and who I was with. Fair enough.
And so it went. We had a good, long, healthy discussion about privilege and responsibility, and how a healthy life requires both things in equal proportion. Self-centered decisions come with proportionate responsibility.
No one gets a free ride for hurting others.
All the privilege, none of the responsibility
Living in a nation with universal health coverage is a massive privilege.
While significantly less so, so is living in a country like America that has a partial national health service for kids, some veterans and disabled, old people, the ultra-poor, and some mandated insurance for the working class.
For most of human history, people who got sick just died.
It is unjust to allow non-vaccinated people to shatter national health services.
It’s time to make them pay.
As in, it’s time to make a national announcement:
“Starting April 1st, all anti-vaxxers who are hospitalized for Covid-19 will be required to pay the full cost of their drain on the medical system.”
This, of course, would not apply to people who can’t get the vaccine for legitimate medical reasons, and the benefits of this decision would be manifold:
It would avoid the need for Covid-19 vaccine mandates.
It would give anti-vaxxers on the edge some serious pause. Money talks. It is likely that millions would stop messing around and finally get protected from hospitalization and death.
It would maintain the strength and economic support that healthcare systems require, ensuring they don’t collapse.
It would ensure that all the other millions of non-Covid patients get the timely care they require.
People are absolutely entitled to their life decisions, but not at the expense of others.
Even in the case of privatized health systems like America’s, why should others have to shoulder higher premiums? Why should insurance companies have to pay huge hospital bills for someone who won’t do the bare minimum to keep themselves from harm and death? Suicide isn’t covered for a reason.
It’s time for anti-vaxxers to stop abusing their privilege and start taking responsibility for their choices.
But what about fat people?!
Whenever you mention personal responsibility, people immediately leap to the argumentum ad sublimatione — the rather ridiculous extrapolation argument.
Basically, they say, “Okay, if you’re going to charge anti-vaxxers for destroying the health service” — thereby admitting your premise is sound — “then why not charge fat people for overeating or smokers for smoking?”
In a way, they’re really and truly right: Democracy absolutely must have a conversation about charging a health insurance premium to addiction-based corporations like fast-food restaurants, cigarette manufacturers, and social media monopolies.
But extrapolating laws breaks down in the face of reality all the time:
Murder is illegal, but do we ban the killing of animals, insects, and plants?
You can’t have chickens in most backyards, but do we ban the eating of eggs?
You can’t drive over the speed limit in a school zone, but do we limit planes to 10 miles per hour.
You can see how silly an argumentum ad sublimatione can quickly become.
Why?
Because principles aren’t laws.
Don’t let people conflate those two things in your presence. Yes, we need to have a discussion about the principle of personal responsibility versus collective care for one another, but don’t let people try to distract themselves from the law in question with conflation and poor argumentation.
Each law is specific for a reason — to address a specific circumstance.
In this case, we have a group of intransigent people who refuse to take a proven therapeutic that trains immune systems from dying, and in doing so, they are putting the lives of millions at risk due to collapsing health services.
What are we to do?
The most cold-hearted and anti-human thing would be to say, “If you aren’t vaxxed, you can’t come to a hospital — you’re on your own, die at home.” There are sadly far too many pro-vax people who hold this anti-human position. It is deeply hateful, unmerciful, and wrong. Every life is always worth saving.
We could let anti-vaxxers continue this charade and watch our health services collapse. (Which, tellingly, many right/libertarian-leaning hyper-individualists would support anyway.)
We could force vaccinations. (Which isn’t unreasonable in all circumstances, but is so in this one.)
That’s why this fourth option makes the most sense.
The carrot: Here is a totally free and totally optional therapeutic that will help protect you from hospitalization and death by Covid. Take it or leave it, the choice is completely up to you and we respect your decision. God be with you.
The stick: If you decide to disregard the commons, then, in this specific case, your wish is granted — you’re economically on your own. If you maintain an anti-vax position, get Covid, and have to be hospitalized, the invoice will be delivered by mail.
It’s that simple.
If you refuse the vaccine and get Covid, you have to pay for hospitalization. No vaccine passports, no forced vaccines, no drama, no judgment, no digital bickering. Welcome to the Covid-19 Personal Responsibility Mandate.
It’s one of the fairest and most equitable laws imaginable, and as one astute reader points out, we already have a precedent:
“If you’re in a car accident and not wearing a seat belt, good luck getting an insurance company to pay your medical bills.”
Arguments don’t save lives
Regardless of your stance on the actual vaccine and its efficacy, I continue to be baffled by the poor arguments put forward by the anti-vax community. It’s the lack of vigorous Socratic thinking that bodes darkly for the long-term viability of our civilization:
“Inclusivity”
Anti-vaxxers who’ve managed to read this far will be quick to yell that, from their algorithm-informed viewpoint at least, this idea is “divisive” and not “inclusive” (though let’s be extremely honest — do they really care about unity and inclusion?)
The problem with this premise is that this argument by its very nature works in both directions. The pro-vaccine side sees the anti-vax position as deeply divisive, exclusionary, and downright dangerous to vulnerable populations. So which side can claim to be unifying and inclusive? Clearly, neither.
“Divisive”
It’s simply a bad argument to say “don’t make people take personal responsibility because it’s not unifying.” Because the goal here isn’t national unity — it’s to keep the most number of people alive. This will mean ensuring our healthcare systems don’t collapse due to a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
“Discrimination”
What’s so elegant about a Covid personal responsibility mandate is that no one can dopily scream “discrimination!”
Because this idea does the exact opposite — it allows people to make the free choice not to get vaccinated and go about their lives, while also bearing the consequences of their decision. It’s freeing and empowering, rather than controlling and dominating.
“Coercion”
The personal responsibility mandate doesn’t require any thought coercion. For those who wish to remain in the metaverse that believes the Covid-19 vaccine is a scam, they are permitted to do so. This law wouldn’t force anyone to change their beliefs about this particular vaccine; it will simply require them to pay if their belief later burdens the health service.
“Mild”
Anti-vaxxers are absolutely right on this one: The reality is that for most people (thank God) Covid-19 is quite mild. But then they pull a huge misdirection and try to extrapolate the mildness argument globally, and their rationale falls apart.
Covid will likely be with us for the rest of our lives and we’ll eventually adapt, but in the meantime, for the hundreds of millions of people that Covid would otherwise kill, the vaccine massively lowers their chances of hospitalization and death.
“Experimental”
Many anti-vaxxers use the social-media-driven talking point that this vaccine is “experimental,” but it’s simply not true — no vaccine in history has so much readily available data. But do you know what? It’s totally your decision to believe it’s still experimental; it simply means you need to take personal responsibility for your hospitalization if you decline a vaccine that drastically reduces hospitalization.
“Perfection”
Of course, nothing can please the most hardcore anti-vaxxers. Set the burden of “proof” high enough and nothing can be proven. What’s fascinating is that, by demanding perfection of this vaccine, anti-vaxxers betray the limits of their logic. (Because, after all, no human immune system has fended off every disease and lived forever — that’s just not how biology works.)
“Low risk”
Anti-vaxxers are clearly higher risk-takers than the average person. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard them say, “Why get a shot when the survival rate is 99%?” And the answer is: Because different people have different risk tolerances, and why should the majority pay for the higher-risk decisions of the minority?
We can imagine it this way: Picture sitting in a church with 100 people that you dearly love — family, friends, neighbors. One of your beloved community members will die this year, choking and gasping for air. Would you take the shot to potentially save yourself or one of those 100 friends? Thankfully, most people think free shots in the arm are worth it to save 1 in 100 lives.
Remember, a 1% death rate is still more than 100X higher than your chances of dying in a car accident. Yet everyone sane wears seatbelts.
“Tyranny”
Perhaps my greatest alignment with the anti-vax crowd is the very real concern about government overreach. Despotic sociopathic politicians will never let a good crisis go to waste in stripping freedoms and wealth from the peasant class, but that’s not a good enough excuse to risk hospitalization and death.
I’ve written an entire article on vaccine passports which I would encourage everyone to read and seriously ponder.
“Freedom”
Our hyper-individualist anti-culture cannot fathom the original definition of freedom that the Greeks and Romans used: Freedom was “the ability to do right in all circumstances.” Today, Americans conflate freedom with autonomy. And they want full “freedom,” no matter what it costs others. But here’s the problem: We all share one common freedom.
If you are alone on a desert island, you can eat all the food and cut down all the trees. But if there are two of you, you both share that one freedom. America is an “island” of 325+ million souls, all sharing one freedom — which means everyone’s freedom will have to have some limits. This isn’t enslaving, though: It’s freeing. By limiting every citizen’s “right” to kill, we all enjoy the freedom not to be killed. By taking away the freedom to steal, we all enjoy the freedom of rarely being robbed. By making people take personal responsibility regarding getting jabbed or not jabbed with this particular vaccine, we can all be freed from the tyranny of forcing each other (in either direction) to do something we don’t want to do, and everyone pays for the result of their choice.
“Fake”
Millions of people don’t even believe Covid is real. I honestly don’t know how we can help people like this, except perhaps by encouraging them to delete Facebook. America is currently experiencing a brutal mental breakdown, and those who deny the existence of something we can literally see under a microscope need our love, care, and support as they navigate back to reality.
The anti-vax solution
At the end of the day, there remains one huge question:
What are anti-vaxxers offering the world that has proven to be more effective at preventing Covid deaths than the Covid vaccine?
The answer is: Nothing.
They would have us abolish the vaccine and globally take our chances without pathogen-prepared immune systems, rolling the dice and killing millions in the process.
Take all the other therapeutics you want, and absolutely get healthy, but the #1 therapeutic for preventing death by Covid is the Covid vaccination.
So get vaxxed, don’t get vaxxed, whatever. Covid-19 isn’t dangerous enough for vaccine mandates. But it still kills a heartbreaking number of the unvaccinated.
If an anti-vaxxer gets infected and has to be hospitalized, or infects another non-vaccinated person and that person dies, why should the pro-science majority pay for it? When we have a way to protect ourselves against the vast majority of Covid hospitalization and deaths, dying anti-vaxxers sadly have no one else to blame but themselves.
Conclusion
It all boils down to this: Should the commons be forced to pay for an individual’s right to choose non-vaccination? The answer, if we believe in the Covid-19 Personal Responsibility Mandate, is clearly no.
So far, no nation has adopted this sensible strategy. Yet. The Canadian province of Quebec — where the 10% unvaccinated make up a massive 50% of intensive care cases — is introducing a “no vax tax,” because anti-vaxxers need to bear the full economic responsibility of their decisions in this specific case.
At the end of the day, we all want the world to “get back to normal.” But we can’t do that while the hospitals are full of Covid-sick anti-vaxxers. Without a mandate, the only other option is to make them pay for overloading our healthcare systems.
We need to love and care for each other, friends.
The opposite of love isn’t hate — it’s selfishness.
We have become so unbelievably anti-commons, so self-focused.
We need a lot more selflessness in our individualist anti-culture.
And sometimes, for the sake of others, love requires people to bear the consequences of their actions.
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