People should be required to be vaccinated, and show proof of vaccination, to use indoor, public spaces: Work outside the home, shop, go to restaurants, etc.
Exemption should be made for people with legitimate medical reasons they can’t be vaccinated. Those people should wear masks, and practice social distancing.
Anti-vaxxers can just stay home and let responsible adults get on with their lives.
Covid Is Now a Crisis for the Unvaccinated, by Aaron E. Carroll, chief health officer for Indiana University, writing at the NY Times:
… to suggest that Covid-19 is an escalating emergency in the United States is not quite right. The truth is that the vaccinated and the unvaccinated are experiencing two very different pandemics right now. If we don’t confront that, the nation can’t address either appropriately.
People in areas with high vaccination rates are doing fine. Unvaccinated areas are still in the worst of the pandemic. Hospitals are filling up again, people are going on ventilators and dying.
Even the Delta variant is not a major threat to everyone in the United States. It is largely a threat to the unvaccinated.
Over 97% of people hospitalized for Covid-19 are unvaccinated.
Even in areas of high vaccination rates, some people can’t be vaccinated, and the vaccine doesn’t work as well for everyone. The best thing we can do for these people is to get everyone around them immunized.
Mandate the vaccine, not masks, by German Lopez at Vox:
A year ago, requiring masks as cases spiked would have been an obviously smart decision. Mask mandates work, and for most of 2020, they were among the best methods we had to stop the spread of Covid-19. But masks were never meant to be the long-term solution; they were a stopgap until the US and the rest of the world could stamp out epidemics through vaccination.
Now those vaccines are here. And the changed circumstances of summer 2021 call for new approaches. Any entity thinking about a mask requirement — from private businesses to local, state, and federal governments — should consider mandating something else first: vaccination.
Vaccine mandates have been shown to work in France—one of the more vaccine-skeptical countries in the West—-and Israel.
(Via Daring Fireball)
Also:
David Frum: Vaccinated America Has Had Enough [The Atlantic]
And Ezra Klein is skeptical vaccine mandates will fly, and he says we’ve done pretty much everything we can to convince people to get the vaccine: What if the Unvaccinated Can’t Be Persuaded? [NY Times]
Mitch's Blog 