August 22, 2021 11:40 AM
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Practicing Personal Responsibility With Public Health

By  Healthcare  6 Comments

Scamdemic, Clot Shot, and other general paranoia about COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccination has been floating around MAGA social media feeds lately. Left-leaning social media feeds are chiding the MAGA feeds for not believing in science. Though, their seemingly religious-like devotion to science has no room to ask honest questions, like whether or not natural immunity gained from surviving COVID-19 is at the same level as someone who is vaccinated, to seek the best treatment for that individual–“just get the treatment and don’t ask questions.”

Neither is a winnable strategy. The delta variant of COVID-19 is running rampant in the United States. The hotspots are, unsurprisingly, where the majority of the population is unvaccinated.

The Dalton Mayor David Pennington declared a state of emergency due the rapid spread of COVID this past Monday. Some local governments are weighing mask mandates again. Those mandates will catch businesses in the middle having to deal with hostile customers who consider a piece of cloth on their face a threat to their dignity and freedom. Large events, like concerts and conventions, are being, or will likely be, postponed due to spiking infection rates. These issues could have been mitigated by more people getting one of the vaccines.

Vaccines, any vaccine, isn’t without risk. The chance of an adverse reaction is never zero. The protection that a vaccine provides isn’t 100%. Those are usually the arguments that COVID skeptics use pointing to how it’s “my body, my choice” or that their faith in Jesus will deliver them. Sure, okay. That’s why it’s important to talk with your healthcare provider–and ask for a second opinion if you don’t like what your primary healthcare provider tells you. Ask the questions if you have concerns about how the vaccine could affect you.

The reality is that your chances are survival and avoiding the serious effects of COVID are much better with the vaccine than without. I got the vaccine because I believe the risk from the vaccine is much lower than the risk from catching COVID. I encourage you to get the vaccine, the overwhelming majority of the medical community encourages you to get vaccinated, President Joe Biden encourages you to get vaccinated, and former President Donald Trump encourages you to get vaccinated. Like I said, vaccines aren’t 100%, but they help protect you against disease. The COVID-19 virus will adapt and change to breakthrough the immunity we gain–it’s how infections work.

Our public health really does affect us all–it’s why many communities have water sanitation facilities to provide the general public squeaky clean water and not succumb to water-borne illnesses. Our overall public health will affect our pocketbooks. Private insurers are now beginning to no longer waive the cost of covering hospitalizations due to COVID-19. You can expect the cost of being unvaccinated to go up–maybe substantially once waivers begin expiring in October.

In short, your health is your responsibility, but it does have a greater impact beyond just you. If you’re in relative good health, I’d encourage you to get the vaccine. Talk to your healthcare provider, look over the data, trust that the people who research and develop these vaccine actually know what they’re doing, and be weary of those spreading misinformation or disinformation.

About Author

nsmith

Father. IT Geek. Former 14th District GOP Chairman (2015-2017). Former Walker GOP Chairman (2009-2013). Resident of Chamblee. American. Georgian. Conservative.

6 Comments
  1. GeneHartke

    Medicare for All is too extreme though…

  2. armanidog

    They booed Trump when he said to get the vaccine.
    How many folks who have not gotten the vaccines read this site?

  3. Chatsprint

    Headline: “Personal Responsibility”

    Paragraph 1: “Left-leaning social media feeds are chiding the MAGA feeds for not believing in science.”
    I now suspect my parents never knew the true meaning of personal responsibility, cause this blog post pretty much flushes my upbringing straight down the toilet.

    “…seemingly religious-like devotion to science”.

    I like this take really well. I’ll remember it next time the urge hits to whip up an ivermectin cocktail and chase it with a little clorox.

  4. Will Durant

    Rejection of science is to be expected from certain segments of Georgia society. This comes from a person old enough that it was required that I be taught one particular religion’s myths alongside science when I received a public education in Georgia.

    I still lean libertarian on most of my politics and am a live and let live type, locally, nationally, and worldly. That being said, I think you have to draw a line somewhere when the public health of us all are concerned. I’m just not smart enough to know where that line should be drawn.

  5. bethebalance

    So, overall, good to see encouragement to think abt the public consequences of personal actions.
    But I also think it’s clear that vaccine endorsements don’t wholly translate into belief or action. (Beliefs are in fact the most stubborn of psychic constructs, and there are rare ways, on average, to influence someone’s beliefs or actions thereto, and data or science will have no appeal to anyone whose belief system doesn’t already highly value data.)
    Thus, I think the moral arguments have more impact. And that’s perhaps where the headline of “personal responsibility” comes in– because that is an ideological belief that ppl may value.
    Except Personal Responsibility doesn’t encompasses Social Responsibility unless ppl already value that. In other words, it’s incredibly difficult to get someone to change their behavior based upon empathy for social problems when they don’t already embed social problems into their existing definition of personal responsibility.
    In fact, just calling it an issue personal responsibility may diminish the odds that it would be applied to address a social problem. Rather, there should be a moral question: Does your sense of personal responsibility include your contributions to social problems, or their resolution? If not, why not?
    Even the most hardcore of libertarians might well agree that if you pollute the air, it is your job to clean it up…
    But then again…there may be no moral issue at all, but rather based upon a more positivistic belief…. that natural immunity is better, or more efficacious in the long-term….
    And of course, everybody, including scientists, are asking these questions, and answers may come and go as they are able to, based upon scientific capacity. But it is of course wholly incorrect to say folks of liberal tendencies don’t care about those questions or the answers. They do. Duh- why wouldn’t they care what works best?
    So, just setting up that dichotomy hinders the argument because you insert the influence of political beliefs where the focus should be on solving a problem regardless.
    But everybody has questions, and most are similar. Folks who advocate treatment now, strongly, may have just already done the math, and see the clear value of vaccination. Questions may not be answered for years depending on timelines of experiments and such. So, you gonna wait for 3 years for every question to be answered, or are you gonna go with the facts and probabilities as we have them now? Are you going to put your faith into the advice of the vast majority of experts, or instead just value the dissenting opinions (probly because they’re the ones that already align with your sense of “responsibility”)?
    No -it is the concept of “responsibility” that must be broadened to include your impacts and roles in creating and addressing social problems. It’s a lot of work, and we all have our limits, but you should do what you can, and vaccinations and a piece of cloth are pretty low-hanging fruit. So I hope folks can pull their sense of personal responsibility from out of their personal body parts, and then see the wisdom, morality, science, and faith embodied within taking on a role of social responsibility.

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