This post was the inspiration for a Letter to the Editor submitted to Wired868 last week. It’s decidedly less diplomatic.

If you’d told me two years ago that humanity’s response to a virus that could sweep the globe and kill nearly 5 million people would be to squabble over vaccination while more people died, I… I might have believed it, actually. I wouldn’t have wanted to, but given everything else going at the time, the idea that we would look at a situation that clearly required collaboration and turn it into a series of petty power struggles would not have been beyond belief. 

2019 was a hell of a year (before we really found out what a hell of a year could really be).

Watching people refuse vaccination on a variety of baffling grounds since then would have been entertaining but for the fact that the very nature of a contagious virus is that it does not discriminate and will do its best to mutate in a way that enhances its ability to spread if given the chance. Plus, watching hospitals fill up and seeing the pain of families who lost their loved ones tends to take the humour out of the thing.

So, as a person responsible for the life of another person, it should shock absolutely no one that I got vaccinated as soon as possible and have done everything I can to protect her while we wait for a time when she can be safely vaccinated too. Unfortunately, this is the corner of the multiverse where that stance is indeed shocking to some and those same people are demanding the right to freely spread the virus that, again, is actively killing people.

Nineteen months in, I’m no longer fazed by this response. This is, after all, a place that eagerly imports the lowest common denominator of thought from up north and where parliamentary political discourse is often best labelled “viewer’s discretion is advised”.

That a significant amount of our population will ignore common sense in favour of whatever their political or religious leaders tell them is not news. That another sizeable chunk of us will not do what’s best for ourselves unless the authority puts its boot on our necks is also par for the course. No one (and especially not the powers that be) should have been surprised to hear this segment cry discrimination when the concept of Safe Zones was introduced and when in-person school was reopened for vaccinated students only.

What is baffling, though, is the creeping acquiescence to this contingent. Hidden behind the air of “welp, we tried”, is an alarming shift towards returning to business as usual without ensuring that the most vulnerable members of our population are properly protected. Having provided ample opportunity for the public to access free vaccinations, the government seems ready to make an about-face on its previously firm stance of controlling the virus’ spread and let the chips fall where they may.

That might seem reasonable. After all, folks had their chance. If they get COVID and end up on a ventilator, they look fuh dat, right?

Except, like everything else related to this damned pandemic, it’s not that simple.

Don’t get me wrong, my empathy is not boundless. If you were eligible to be vaccinated and refused because [insert your favourite easily debunked conspiracy theory here] and you land up in the ICU, that is what we call reaping the seeds you sowed. My empathy extends as far as to the healthcare providers who have to do their best to heal you knowing that all of this could have been avoided had you just listened to reason. And your loved ones. I have empathy for them too.

HOWEVER, that ICU bed you’re occupying? The medical personnel treating you and those resources you’re using? In a country without a parallel healthcare system, chances are, someone else needs them for something unrelated to COVID and they can’t have them. At the rate we’re going in this country, where we were fortunate to have leaders with the foresight to set up a parallel system, that may well be the case before too much longer. Also, while you and your fellow freedom fighters are filling up said system, folks who need surgery and care can’t access it because we do not have an unlimited number of medical professionals.

When you send your unvaccinated child to school among vaccinated children, you increase the likelihood that those vaccinated children will take an unsymptomatic case of COVID home to their families and infect their grandparents, younger siblings (who can’t yet be vaccinated), or other vulnerable family members who are waiting futilely for herd immunity so they can be safe.

But I’m preaching to the choir here, because anyone who’d bother to get this far certainly doesn’t believe that I’m trying to convince them to willingly line up to receive the mark of the beast. So let me turn my attention to the people who are actually perplexing me these days: the apathetic vaccinated crew.

First things first, I want to say I get it. I am tired. I am over this pandemic. I am over the masks, the restrictions, the pervasive feeling that other people are dangerous, ALL. OF. IT. That said, as I’ve paraphrased before, the pandemic isn’t over just because we’re over it. Similarly, just because we opted to protect ourselves and our loved ones doesn’t mean that tens of thousands of other people in this country aren’t currently at risk because of the anti-vaxx/vaxx-hesitant crew.

And yes, that is our concern.

In the most selfish sense, it’s our concern because the pandemic won’t be over until we grownups get it together and dear GOD, it needs to be over. In a more empathetic sense, please remember that the casualties of this pandemic aren’t just the people killed by the virus. People have lost their livelihoods and cannot feed or house themselves and their families. People are suffering because they can’t get medical care for their pre-existing non-pandemic illnesses. Children have been cooped up inside since MARCH of 2020. Best case for these kids is that their social development is being stunted. Middling case, just their education is suffering. Worst case, health impacts and the fact that a heartbreaking number of them have been trapped in abusive situations from which school was their only escape.

Also, all those deaths that are coming fast and furious enough to numb us due to scale? Families are losing providers and caregivers. Kids are losing parents and grandparents. Communities are falling apart.

These are all very real impacts happening to very real people and when I hear some of the vaccinated contingent speak about and justify the government’s most recent turn, I get the sense that they’ve either forgotten this or never much cared. Because believe you me, I’m under no illusions about the fact that many people got the vaccine because they’ve only ever been concerned about themselves and their loved ones. I’m cool with that if it means more people are protected, but if the pandemic hasn’t yet taught you that you are not an island, then you have more in common with the anti-vaxx crew than you might like to admit to yourself.

Why does any of this matter? Well, the thing about the democratic system as it’s practiced in (too) much of the West is that the people we elect will often do only what they feel they have to do. Political will is a direct outgrowth of what they think they can get away with doing (or not doing). So, if they perceive that they can spare themselves a lot of political headache by letting the unvaccinated do what they want (because the vaccinated are content with making sure that they are personally protected), they just might do it.

This means anyone whose system can’t handle vaccination and anyone who has been vaccinated but will likely still end up in the ICU if they get a breakthrough infection due to pre-existing issues is up a creek. It means thousands more deaths as the ICUs overflow and doctors have to make tough choices with limited resources. It means this whole exhausting mess continues to drag on.

On the other hand, if the powers that be got the impression we were not ok with the idea of thousands more dying as our healthcare system becomes overwhelmed, if we made it clear that we are not cool with leaving society’s most vulnerable unprotected, if we acted as if we actually cared about the unrelenting strain under which our nation’s medical community has been operating all this time… perhaps we could finally do the obvious necessary thing and wrap this shit up.

For that, though, we’d have to trade at least some of this apathy for empathy.