I read a bunch of stuff written by selfish dumbasses who are inconvenienced by being asked to literally do the least they can to help quell the ongoing pandemic. Like many of you, I am on my last nerve with these people.

But then I found someone who was worse than an anti-vaxxer:

This is going to sound flip, but I would very much like to hear a dispassionate case for why the average vaccinated adult w/o comorbidities or vulnerable family should care. https://t.co/akDItECfbH

— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) August 9, 2021

He isn’t some some random tweeter—he’s supposed to be a conservative intellectual. The sheer number of erroneous assumptions in that short statement are immensely irritating.

First, the “average American” has a co-morbidity. That’s our brand, so the idea that most of us shouldn’t care is wrong. Also, the rise in hospital admissions for Covid patients has now put the ICUs of some hospitals at capacity. This means if someone else needs an ICU bed for something non-Covid-related, they may not get the treatment they need in a timely manner.

What else? Well, unvaccinated people run the risk of infecting children under 12 or people who are immuno-compromised, i.e., people who literally cannot be vaccinated right now. A rise in transmission rates leads hospitals and surgical centers to cancel elective surgeries, which doesn’t sound like a big deal, but if you’re suffering from something, it’s quite a lot.

Now those are all fact-based reasons, and so they’re not going to resonate with a right winger like Rothman. But there is another reason, and it’s tied to the crap that Republicans used to love to pontificate about.

We all live together in a society, and each of our lives is linked to lives of people we don’t know. We care about the low rate of vaccination because we care about others in this country. I mean, although it is hard at times to put aside the righteous anger at the stupid intransigence of the anti-vaxxers, it’s not like we want them dead. We just want them vaccinated—they are part of the same society we live in, and their vaccinations protect vulnerable people.

But the right in the US has a different view, one that for years I have been calling “I gots minez”.  It’s not just Covid—they just don’t care about anyone in this nation who is struggling in any way, unless they can bribe those people for their votes. I don’t know how to fix that.