Covid vaccines: rights and responsibilities

The reluctance to vaccinate against Covid-19 is understandable. Maybe you don’t trust the rush of the previous administration to usher in lightning-fast science to develop vaccines, or the encouragement of the current administration to use them. You may have doubts about the vaccine or the disease itself. Maybe you are just afraid of needles. You don’t owe anyone an explanation. As citizens of this great nation, we have the right to choose, the right to decide for ourselves.

I don’t regret a penny of my taxes spent on Operation Warp Speed, although I didn’t have the opportunity or the right to make that decision. Sometimes exceptions to our rights have to be made.

I believe that all rights come with responsibilities and limitations. My right to swing my arm ends where your nose begins. Our right to be intoxicated does not allow us to do so while driving a car on public roads. Your right to own a weapon requires you to use and store it safely.

Your right to refuse the vaccine and the masking gives you the right to contract the coronavirus, but does not give you the right to expose vulnerable people, especially children, too young to receive the vaccine, but not too young to die from. disease.

The number of Covid-19 deaths in the United States among children aged 0 to 18 is on the rise, now more than four times the average seasonal flu deaths of this group over the past 15 years. It might not sound like much – unless it’s your child.

This terrible disease and its variants evolve – just like our behavior. Collective disease immunity was a reasonable hope, but Covid-19 has shown that it can simply mutate to produce another, more contagious variant to which we are not immune. The Covid-19 Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox, but much more deadly, and infects our young people more. Herd immunity can be obtained with a vaccine (think polio and smallpox). Whether you have no symptoms or have had coronavirus in the past isn’t protection – you can still spread the disease.

If my fellow citizens choose not to receive the Covid-19 vaccine, I really don’t care, but those who make that choice should consider themselves loaded with lethal weapons, and behave accordingly.

We could very well be facing yet another horrific social shutdown, pulling us away from our families and friends, overloading our hospitals, shutting down our businesses and schools, and causing more unnecessary suffering and death. If you refuse to protect yourself and others from you, you lose your right to complain if shutdowns happen again.

It was not the fully vaccinated and socially masked citizens who created a new coronavirus storm.

Bobbie Worth lives in Whitefish.