Freedom for whom?

 

East of Eden

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to drag on, one thing is emminently clear to politicians, scientisits, business leaders and the public at large: mass vaccination is the only way out of the pandemic, and thus the only way out of the cycle of restrictions that have been imposed on our lives. Most people can see this, and thus most people in Britain have already gotten vaccinated at this point. But of course, not every country is as fortunate to have vaccination rates as high as ours.

In Austria, which has among the lowest vaccination rates in Europe at 42%, has recently become the first country in Europe to make it mandatory for all eligible citizens to recieve the Covid vaccine. In the US, only about 59% of the population has been vaccinated, which sounds fine until you remember that a large and vocal part of the population resists the idea…

View original post 1,944 more words

Vaccinations and anti-vaxers

Ex-president Donald Trump was against vaccinations and even did want Americans to believe the “Chinese disease would soon be over”. This ego tripper managed lots of Americans not to believe in the dangers of the Coronavirus.

By his misleading words he got many Republicans, evangelicals, but also poor blacks, and Hispanics to believe it are foreign forces and socialists or, worse, communists, trying to undermine the American society. Today many are suspicious of the government which would have become in power by a fraud election. Conservative evangelicals are among the quickest to share all those absurd stories about a.o. coronavirus-related conspiracy reaching to the highest levels of government. In many countries we can see that it is the Religious Right which is a hothouse of anti-vax activism and health fads.

Fools will readily believe a case without closely seeking out and attending to the criticisms of it (Proverbs 18:17). They routinely judge before hearing. They also attend to and spread rumours, inaccurate reports, and unreliable tales, while failing diligently to pursue the truth of a matter. The wise, by contrast, examine things carefully before moving to judgment or passing on a report. {Wisdom and Folly in Christian Responses to Coronavirus}

a lot of youngsters only go be the headings on their Social Media. Titles on You Tube or on Facebook, without going to read the article, let withstand to think about it and to examine what is said in it.

They do not follow up closely on viewpoints that they have advanced, seeking criticism and cross-examination to ascertain their truth or falsity. And when anything is proven wrong, they do not return to correct it. {Wisdom and Folly in Christian Responses to Coronavirus}

You would think, in the U.S.A., after the new president tried to get some order again, the American citizens would get back to their senses. The number of new Covid-19 cases per day has increased dramatically in the United States in the past month. New, dangerous variants have spread widely. At first Trump could convince people not to wear masks, but luckily now they show up in many parts of the country. Artists, often looked at as being “left”, went to get their vaccination as soon as they could. CEO’s also did not wait to long before getting vaccinated. But for the lowest-income groups, we can see it is more difficult to get people over the line. In the U.S.A. only 1.1 percent of the population of poor countries has received a single shot. Some people have surrendered to a sense of doom because they formed unreasonable expectations that the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines would miraculously obliterate the virus.

You would expect after the 2020 lockdowns, the 2.4 million Americans hospitalised and the 610,000 killed, more Americans would hurry to get the vaccinations over and done with. But the unmistakable fact is that they’ve made great progress in recent months to smother the virus and steer national life back toward normal. Where 5,463 people died from Covid-19 on one day at the beginning of the year, the daily death count is now bouncing in the low hundreds. One good thing may be that already an undetermined number of people have acquired some immunity from Covid-19 by exposure to it.

Today in America, severe Covid-19 infections and death are almost entirely in unvaccinated people. And the vaccines are still remarkably effective — of the 163 million fully vaccinated in the United States, only 1,141 have died from the virus.

It is known that the older you are, the greater the chance of getting seriously ill or dying from CoViD, and the younger you are, the less likely you are to have serious symptoms. This makes a lot of youngsters not worrying or not afraid of getting infected. For them there are many reasons not to receive an injection. Though lots of those reasons are based on absurd messages on Social Media. Social Media is doing a lot of damage and undermining national safety. One would expect them to see now, that because of the success of the vaccination in the older population, that the infection rate from the Delta variant has sent the number of infections soaring, the number of deaths, at least right now, is surprisingly low.

Young and old should come to recognise this virus is not an ordinary virus, like we have seen previously several viruses coming over the lands. It is not a virus that shall allow us to cry victory soon. No matter who might be president or in power, all shall have to start with acknowledging that it’s not within our power to eliminate Covid-19 from our shores the way we have polio, or to vaccinate every American against the virus. If we’re willing to agree on an end goal of dramatically reducing the severe illness and deaths from the virus, however, we might begin to see what winning is about.

According to Anthony Fauci the vaccines are even effective against the new variants that people fret so much about.

“A higher percentage of Americans have taken a Covid-19 vaccine in the past seven months than took a flu vaccine during the catastrophic 2017-18 flu season (37 percent of adults). Only 54 percent of the American population had taken the Salk polio vaccine six years after its introduction. Viewed from these angles, Americans in 2021 have not been particularly “vaccine hesitant.”

he says. But when we see news coverage and some documentaries about the handling of CoViD in the United States we got another view, with a lot of people between the age of 20-40 coming up with a lot of reasonable and sometime idiotic fantasies why they do not want to be vaccinated.

All over the world people should become convinced that it is a matter of not only protecting yourself, but out of love for the other, protecting those around you. The more people we vaccinate, the safer we all are today and how sooner we can go back to a normal life. We need everybody to be able to go to work, to have all the shops, pubs and event centres open again. Trying to get everything working properly again, we should safeguard ourselves by taking enough precautions that the illness can not spread. The less opportunity dangerous variants will have to emerge and spread tomorrow the better our life shall be and the better our economy shall be able to recover from those two years ‘disaster’.

So many in France and Germany shout about their freedom being taken, but do they ever think about what freedom really might be? Freedom is also respecting the freedom of others!

The age factor helps to explain why the rate of vaccination has stalled and is unlikely to accelerate, especially among the 19-to-49 crowd, many of whom feel immortal. We also hear that several of that age group in Europe went only to get their vaccination to be able to travel or to go to music festivals.

Some people also point to the fact that lots of people die in car accidents or find their death by having cancer. They say the older generation reacted to strongly on a disease which perhaps should be regarded like any other flu variant or a disease that comes over our countries once in a while to bring a clean brush against overpopulation.

Jack Shafer, Politico’s senior media writer, agrees that everybody who can access a Covid-19 vaccine should line up and get the shot. Right now. But he also points out that we need to determine our “tolerance level” for the disease, realising that we are unlikely to eradicate it completely but that we cannot keep shutting down our society in an effort to eliminate all risk. According to him we also don’t do that with other diseases. He points out that in the 2017-2018 flu season, influenza put 810,000 Americans in the hospital and killed 61,000. Those are terrible numbers, but we didn’t panic, mandate masks, or lock down the economy.

+

Also interesting to read

1. Remembering what happened in the previous influenza pandemic
2. According to Pew Most White Evangelicals Don’t Think COVID-19 is a Medical Crisis
3. Undermining security and democracy via the Internet
4. No time yet to relax the CoViD-19 restriction measures
5. Lockdown greetings for a newer year
6. Not created to be on our own
7. CoViD-19 Curation
8. A new start when the lockdown comes to an end
9. NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo his state of the state address
10. G7 and Building Back Better
11. Good time to sort out your friends and contacts
12. In Coronatime thinking about death
13. A living Word giving confidence
14. Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief

+++

Related

1. Wisdom and Folly in Christian Responses to Coronavirus
2. Employee shortage, COVID-19 surge leave ICU nurses exhausted
3. Japan’s pandemic entering ‘new phase’ as Tokyo COVID-19 cases hit record high
4. As delta variant spreads, New York City ramps up vaccination efforts among students
5. Clubs NSW calls for COVID-19 vaccinated individuals to be allowed back into venues
6. NYC, Big Employers Taking Hard Line Against Vaccine Holdouts
7. Be aware of othersAugust 1, 2021
8. Waking Up
9. Anti Vaxers
10. Hospital CEO tells anti-vaxers to ‘shut up’
11. Public hearing underway as thousands want a say in the proposed ban on religious exemption for childhood vaccines
12. How To Talk To Anti-maskers And Not Lose Your Mind
13. Mick Jagger and Dave Grohl mock anti-vaxxers in new song
14. Jaco: Welcome to the death lottery; wanna play?
15. Re- emerging
16. 07/12/2021 Summer Doldrums
17. “Freedumb Must Reign!”
18. 28 & 1/3 Grams
19. It Sails Through the Air
20. Covid returns again – Why are you still not vaccinated?
21. I’m mad as hell, and not sorry
22. Give Them The Stick, Not The Carrot
23. Jaco: Make the anti-vaxers pay
24. Those who not get to the vaccine
25. Anti-vaxers had their fun
26. Wild deer found to have coronavirus antibodies in four-state study