https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...-covid-anti-vaxxers-increase-american-deaths/
Here is perhaps the most important medical and political fact of our time:
99.5 percent of all covid-19-related deaths in the United States occur among unvaccinated people; 0.5 percent of covid deaths occur among vaccinated people. If you tell people not to be vaccinated, you add to the former category.
In this light, the recent
outbreak of applause at the Conservative Political Action Conference for the United States’ failure to meet its vaccination target was macabre. Here were political activists — many of whom would call themselves “pro-life” — cheering for the advance of death.….
In the case of Fox News celebrities in particular, they must know that discouraging vaccination — by exaggerating risks, highlighting unproven alternative therapies and normalizing anti-vaccine voices — will result in additional, unnecessary deaths. This is hard to get my head around. If someone were to pay me as a columnist to argue that cigarette smoking is healthy for children, or to encourage teenagers to take naps on railroad tracks after underage drinking, I don’t think I could make an ethical case for accepting the deal.….
Fox News’s conservative anti-vaxxers gain advantages — in viewers and influence — by feeding conspiratorial fears that can kill their viewers. Standing outside politics for a moment, is this really the sum of their ambitions? Is this a reason to get out of bed in the morning? How does someone look in the mirror and say: Today, I will purposely misinform people in ways that increase their risk of hospitalization and death?….
No one has forced Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.), Ron Johnson (Wis.), or Ted Cruz (Tex.), Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio) or Madison Cawthorn (N.C.), or many of their Republican peers to encourage vaccine skepticism, or to slander vaccine promotion as oppression, or to make selfish, destructive health decisions into a new civic rights cause. Yet they have. They are not proposing a realistic, alternative way to defeat a pandemic. They are undermining the only way to defeat a pandemic, because it will endear them to Trump stalwarts.…
