The Wrongologist

The Daily Escape:

The Sensorio, Paso Robles, CA – This Field of Light display in Paso Robles uses 60,000 fiber-optic stemmed spheres to transform 15 acres of rolling hills into an awesome light show. It is on display until January 2022. Wrongo hopes to visit it later this year.

From Leonard Pitts:

“We were almost there….It was only two months ago the CDC said we could put our masks away.

We were this close to getting this thing under control, to seeing one another smile, to cookouts, to visiting grandpa, to signing off Zoom, to normal. Now we see it all slipping away as inexorably as the tide going out. We return to masking up….”

But now, we’re not so close anymore, and it’s time to stop coddling the reluctants, the vaccine haters, and the angry people who are trying to kill the rest of us by doing nothing to help. Eight months after the first vaccine was approved, vaccine hesitancy persists.

This toxic individualism is making life in America more dangerous than it needs to be. Vaccine mandates are needed. People need to recognize that their choices have consequences. And if it upsets a few politicians and pundit types, so be it.

And vaccinated Americans are getting fed up with being put at risk and potentially forced into further restrictive measures by the politically hostile and belligerently unvaccinated. Many red states have pre-emptively banned any public or private measures to implement restrictions based on vaccination status.

One result is that a wave of businesses, schools and government agencies are spontaneously considering vaccine mandates to lead the country in the exactly right direction. Their efforts are popular, as new polling by The COVID States Project shows:

They questioned a national sample of 20,669 adults between June 9th and July 7^th.  From the survey:

• 64% of respondents said in June or July that they’d support government vaccine requirements.
• 70% said they’d support vaccine requirements to get on an airplane; 61% support requiring children to be vaccinated to go to school; and 66% support requiring college students to be vaccinated to attend a university.

But as with everything in America, not everyone thinks the same way:

• A majority of every demographic subgroup except Republicans said they’d support vaccine requirements. Only 45% of Republicans said they approve of such mandates.
• A majority of respondents in all but three states — Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota — said they support requirements that everyone be vaccinated.

One argument for implementing mandates is that many who remain unvaccinated are increasingly open to it. Nationwide, 16% of those unvaccinated today say they’ll get the vaccine if required, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports.  That’s more than the 14% who said they would never get the vaccine.

Those who haven’t or won’t get vaccinated probably have noticed that the rest of us have gotten angry about having to go back to wearing masks because of them. The nudge could be a mandate, or it could be institutions setting up unpleasant alternatives to getting vaccinated, like more frequent testing or required indoor masking.

From the Intelligencer:

“Mandates wouldn’t necessarily be easy to impose, even with those who aren’t hard-core anti-vaccination. More than 150 workers…resigned…after Houston Methodist required them to get the vaccine this summer. (A federal judge had tossed a lawsuit against the hospital’s mandate).”

This becomes a question of whether workers’ individual rights can be compromised in the name of public health. It may not be possible to make getting vaccinated a condition of employment, but a company, a hospital or a government agency would be within its rights to enforce a regime of daily testing for unvaccinated employees.

Employer mandates may just be the thing that turns the tide:

Since Biden’s election, the Republican strategy has been simple: sabotage the administration’s goal of vaccine-based herd immunity. The idea is that either pandemic-weary voters will rebel at the prospect of a new round of mandates, or the virus will overload ICUs and kill another million Americans by the midterms, which Republicans can blame on Biden and Democrats. That’s something Trump is already doing.

The right is whining about how they won’t take the vaccine without FDA approval. It’s deeply disingenuous for them to whine about the FDA when they willingly took Hydroxychloroquine.

Maybe the FDA should just put the vaccine in Mountain Dew.

Time to wake up America! Let’s end the toxic individualism by taking the shot, so we all can get on with our lives.

To help you wake up, listen to Jack Antonoff, a music producer who’s worked with Taylor Swift, Lorde, and Lana Del Rey. He’s got a solo project, Bleachers, and here is Bleachers’ tune “Stop Making This Hurt”, that touches on the theme of mental health and dealing with a notion of inescapable darkness:

Please, stop making this hurt.